"The Death of Paschal Beverly Randolph" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Magia Sexualis: Sexual Practices for Magical Power"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 29
The Death of Paschal Beverly Randolph
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On July 29, 1875, in Toledo, Ohio, a
forty-nine-year-old man died of a gunshot wound in front of a neighbor’s house.
The coroner called it suicide. His wife had recently had an affair; he was
drinking heavily and nearly broke. It was a quiet, sad end for a man who,
twenty years earlier, had lectured to packed halls across two continents,
corresponded with European royalty, and built, from nothing, the first
Rosicrucian order in American history. His name was Paschal Beverly Randolph,
and for the better part of a century after his death, the tradition he helped
invent came very close to forgetting he had existed at all.
The Lecture Circuit
Randolph was born in New York City in
1825, the son of a Black mother, Flora, and a white father who left before he
could remember him. His mother died of cholera when he was six, leaving him to
grow up largely on his own in the notorious Five Points slum, working as a
bootblack, a dyer, a barber, and eventually a hand on merchant ships that
carried him to Europe and the Caribbean. He was almost entirely self-educated.
By his late twenties, that self-education had turned into a career: Randolph
became a sought-after trance medium and lecturer within the Spiritualist
movement, touring under the self-styled title “the barber-orator.” In 1858, he
broke publicly and permanently with the mainstream Spiritualist establishment,
accusing it of racism and hypocrisy even as it postured as a radical,
reform-minded movement. He would spend the rest of his career building
something of his own instead.
That same year, 1858, Randolph
founded the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis,
establishing its first formal lodge in San Francisco in 1861. According to the
influential occult historian A. E. Waite, it
stands as the earliest known Rosicrucian order in the United States, and it
remains active today. What makes the founding more complicated, and more
honest, than it might first appear is that Randolph was candid, at least to
himself, about why he reached for the Rosicrucian label in the first place. He
believed that his own ideas, offered plainly as the original thinking of a
Black American, would never be taken seriously by the white audiences he needed
to reach. Wrapping them in the borrowed authority of an old European esoteric
tradition, he calculated, would get them a hearing his own name alone would
not. It worked. It also meant that the order most responsible for seeding
Rosicrucianism in America was built, in part, as a workaround for the racism of
the world it was trying to reach.
The Science of Eulis
Randolph is remembered today, when he
is remembered at all, primarily as the likely first person to introduce a
systematic practice of sex magic to North America. His major statement on the
subject, Eulis! The History of Love,
laid out a framework in which sexual union, approached with sufficient
discipline and intention, could produce altered states of consciousness and
genuine magical effect, organized under what he called the Brotherhood of
Eulis. He wrote roughly fifty works across his career, on subjects ranging far
beyond magic: clairvoyance, health and medicine, the education of Black
Americans, and, notably, birth control, which he promoted at a time when
discussing it publicly carried real legal risk. His personal emblem, a winged
globe rising over an ancient Egyptian landscape, was paired with a motto that
reads, in hindsight, like the whole shape of his life compressed into one word:
Try.
Randolph’s ideas outlived him more thoroughly than his name did. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, an important transitional group bridging older Rosicrucian currents and the occult revival of the later nineteenth century, drew directly on his work, and through channels like it his influence reached forward into the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn’s own occult milieu, groups whose historians rarely credited him by name. In 1994, the scholar Joscelyn Godwin observed plainly that historians of Western esotericism had largely neglected Randolph, a gap not seriously corrected until John Patrick Deveney’s 1996 biography, written with Franklin Rosemont, gave him his first full scholarly treatment. Race is not the only explanation for that neglect, but it isn’t a coincidence either: a self-taught Black doctor and trance medium, correctly credited as foundational to American Rosicrucianism and sex magic alike, spent a full century as a footnote to movements he had helped originate.
The official record of Randolph’s
death is suicide by gunshot, and the circumstances support it: he was drinking
heavily, in financial trouble, and had recently discovered his second wife Kate
Corson’s affair. Lucas County’s probate records are said to have listed the
death as accidental rather than self-inflicted, a discrepancy with the
coroner’s own finding that has never been fully resolved. Decades later, R. Swinburne Clymer,
who went on to lead a successor Rosicrucian organization, claimed that a former
friend of Randolph’s had confessed on his own deathbed to killing Randolph in a
fit of jealousy. That claim has no corroborating evidence beyond Clymer’s own
account, and this column treats it as exactly what it is: an unverified
secondhand story from a man with an obvious institutional interest in the
legend of his order’s founder. What’s certain is only that Randolph, nine days
before his death, wrote to a friend expressing something close to renewed hope
for the future. Whatever truly happened in Toledo on July 29, it still remains
a mystery…
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Randolph, and the tradition that took a century to
say his name...
Magia Sexualis: Sexual Practices for Magical Power
By
Paschal Beverly Randolph & Maria de Naglowska | Translated by Donald
Traxler | Inner Traditions
A necessary caveat belongs right up
front with this one: Magia Sexualis survives only through a French translation
and adaptation that Maria de Naglowska published more than fifty years after
Randolph's death, and scholars have long noted that while most of its content
traces back to his known writings, a significant portion doesn't, meaning the
book is best understood as Randolph filtered through Naglowska's own additions
rather than a pure transcription of his teaching. With that honestly stated, it
remains the most complete surviving record of the practice Randolph called the
Brotherhood of Eulis, and Donald Traxler's 2012 translation for Inner
Traditions is the standard English edition, with a preface from scholar Wouter
Hanegraaff situating the text's disputed authorship plainly for the reader
rather than hiding it. Our thanks to Inner Traditions for keeping this
genuinely foundational, if genuinely complicated, text in print.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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